My career has been built at the edge of what is physically possible – predicting exotic quantum states, developing sensors that exploit the laws of nature, and teaching machines to reason about the physical world. For a long time, that work lived in journals and laboratories. Now, those technologies are being rapidly adopted for military applications – and not just by the United States and its allies. What just months ago seemed like a five-year problem of global technological competition has now compressed to an urgent 18-month national security sprint. The U.S. is facing a daunting race to develop and field advanced capabilities such as AI and quantum sensors on the battlefield. Many of the scientists who can help win that race are in university physics departments and at deep-tech startups. I have seen the vast potential firsthand. It must be tapped, and quickly.
The science my colleagues and I have spent our careers developing is becoming deployable at a pace that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. Quantum sensors, once confined to specialized laboratories, are shrinking, and physics-informed AI models are learning to fuse streams of sensing data in real time. The boundary between fundamental research and fielded capability is collapsing. For American national security and the military, this is both a challenge and an opening.
